I need to break up a six disk raid 5 into a four disk raid 5 and a two disk mirror.

It sure would be nice to be able to tell the raid controller "move all the data on the array onto disks 0-3, then drop 4-5 from the array." It would be even nicer to be able to say "oh, and do this in the background without bringing th server down." It's an IBM ServeRAID 4xl. (Yes, the server is an ancient IBM 342)

I guess I'll have to do it the old fashioned way, with an external USB drive as a temporary storage holder, boot to a TRK CD and use ddrescue to move data around.

Things that make you go hmmm...

Here is a snip from a netstat -tunap output that caught my eye. It is the ssh session that I was using when I generated the netstat output, so I am not surprised to see it there. What does surprise me is that netstat says it is an IPv6 connection:

tcp6 0 0 ::ffff:192.168.5.87:22 ::ffff:192.168.5.:33235 ESTABLISHED10622/sshd: jfzuelo

There were a few more IPv6 connections as well.

I could have sworn that I blocked IPv6 on the server. So the very next thing that I typed was:

proxy-lnx:# ip6tables -L -n
Chain INPUT (policy DROP)
target prot opt source destination

Chain FORWARD (policy DROP)
target prot opt source destination

Chain OUTPUT (policy DROP)
target prot opt source destination

So if ip6tables thinks that it is dropping any inbound, outbound or forwarded packets, how did openssh manage to create an IPv6 session for me?

Somebody Else's Problem.

I love to hear that.

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Browsing the web logs, specifically dmorales' entry here:

http://www.debian-administration.org/users/dmorales/weblog/1

I noticed that there is (at the time of writing) one response asking for more detail.

There are *NO* responses telling Daniela that she would be happier with OpenNMS or Big Brother or how to write a bunch of bash scripts that will create MRTG graphs and interface with Asterisk to telephone sysadmins at home during the night.

The lack of religious wars, or even a half-hearted attempt to start one bothers me.

Is Debian dying? Going the way of BSD?

I am sad.

It's been a bad week and this is a nice cap for it.

So I set up a brand new Lenny system yesterday. At the end of the installer I left just the basic system selected, deselecting "desktop environment" because I don't like Gnome all that much.

All is nice and well, and today I log into my sleek new system and instead of installing KDE components a group at a time with apt-get, which is a pain because I always forget some font package or something, I decided to cheat and issue a quick "tasksel install kde-desktop". I leave it be and go work on another system while it churns though installing KDE.

After everything finishes up I start kdm, enter my username and password, and look at the nice Gnome desktop.

WTF?

I did *not* say "tasksel install kde-and-gnome-because-I-like-them-both" and I did *not* install the default desktop environment because I knew that was Gnome.

Sigh. Lesson learned -- uncheck everything during the install and stick to apt-get.

Updated 29 October 2008: OpenNMS 1.6.0 is now stable, and supports PostgreSQL 8.3. So you do not need the snapshot.debian.net repository.

OpenNMS has packages for Debian up to the recommended 1.5.93 release. However 1.5.93 does not support PostgreSQL 8.3 that is found in Lenny. It does support PostgreSQL 8.2, recently removed from Lenny.

You can quickly set up an OpenNMS server with Lenny by using the snapshot.net service. Using the sources.list file below, you can take a base image of Lenny and be a quick `apt-get install opennms` away from OpenNMS happiness!

I hear that the snapshot.debian.net people are having a large problem with bandwidth. :( Hopefully we can see a snapshot.debian.org sometime.
================================

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free

deb http://debian.opennms.org/ unstable main
deb-src http://debian.opennms.org/ unstable main

#Postgresql 8.2 from snapshots:
deb http://snapshot.debian.net/archive/2008/04/23/debian unstable main

How do you manage workstations in an enterprise environment? I'm talking about relatively benign situations like setting MIME types across desktops as well as more restrictive scenarios like enforcing proxy settings for Debian desktops.

**CAN** you manage Debian desktops in an enterprise environment?

I am having a difficult time fielding Samba 3.2.x in a Windows 2003 domain. This has me worried, as I would like to move my production Etch boxes to Lenny when it goes stable. (I work in a Microsoft shop, so everything that does not come from Redmond has to be flawless, work on five year old equipment, and invisible to certain individuals.)

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I wonder why dual WAN loadbalancing/failover is so hard for Linux in general. I've been trying to get a Vyatta VC4 install up and running, but run into a problem where a combination of load balancing and NAT breaks things. My boss finally pulled the plug and ordered a hardware solution -- too bad that, as Vyatta VC4 is Lenny based. Given some time, I could probably figure out where it was failing. As far as I can see, the Vyatta system could tell that one of the WAN connections was down and adjust it's internal routes successfully. But it left the kernel routing table in place. So if the kernel routing table said:

Destination Gateway (snip) Iface
0.0.0.0 10.1.0.1 eth1
0.0.0.0 10.2.0.1 eth2

and eth1 dropped, the Vyatta box would simply stop talking.

Probably just a simple hook somewhere in Vyatta's internals to specifically set and unset the kernel routes when it detects a routing change.

But -- now I've been told to move on. :(

Recently had an issue where Samba was malfunctioning, specifically winbind. wbinfo -u and wbinfo -g failed, and log.winbindd had "Could not receive trustdoms" errors when winbindd was started.

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